Out Of The Dark Ages – HD Magazine

This is not my article, but it is so important and enlightening that I have to re-publish it here. If I get in trouble with HD Mag for this, I will take it down. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/9P3taG

Out Of The Dark Ages

VFX Supervisor Marc Weigert reports on the first side-by-side ARRI ALEXA (prototype) and RED Mysterium-X camera test and comes to some game changing conclusions.

After shooting 2012 with Panavision’s Genesis, we began searching uncharted territory for an upcoming feature film project that had a considerably lower budget. Most of the film would be shot in low-light scenarios, and lots of scenes, again, would play in front of blue or green screen. So we knew that we needed a low-grain, high-sensitivity recording solution. My digital compositors, and me personally, have preferred digital noise over film grain for a long time. But not every Director of Photography would think the same way. Some because they’re simply afraid of working in a different medium than they had been for the past decades, and others for more valid reasons like, for instance, dynamic range.

We started testing the RED One with the new Mysterium-X sensor, which has been shipping for a few weeks now, and then the ARRI ALEXA joined the race. The ALEXA is currently a prototype and scheduled to ship in mid-June of this year.

Now, because I’m so excited about what I saw, I’ll give you the test results upfront.

Digital has finally won over film. Yes, for me the most important outcome of this test was not one or the other camera, but that BOTH finally made it possible for me to say this: “FILM (Celluloid, that is), IS DEAD!”

Let me start with a disclaimer here, because I know there will be a mass of hate mail from 35mm film lovers landing on my doorstep very soon. Since I don’t have the time to answer any of it, I would rather like to pre-empt it right now. I have no agenda here. I started out using 8mm film as a teenager, I shot 35mm (and 16mm) film for years and years, I don’t work for a company selling digital equipment of any kind, and I don’t get kick-backs from any such company. But I stick to what I just said. Film is dead.

Film has been in the death throes for a few years by now, as a small part of a huge revolution that has seen ‘digits’ taking over all aspects of our lives. It started in general with computers (anyone using a typewriter right now?), then expanded to other usage areas (anyone listening to 45rpm records right now? Actually, how many of you are even still listening to CDs rather than mp3s?). I don’t think I have to remind anyone that we ALL used to shoot on 35mm still cameras up to the mid-nineties, give or take a few years. And how many of you are still making the trek to the drugstore to have the photos from the last kid’s birthday party developed ?

Then came digital projection systems. Currently, 15% of the world’s screens (over 16,000) are already digital, with growth rate of between 250-280% in many regions. Then digital TV, which is taking over as a standard (in different versions) worldwide. Then DI (Digital Intermediate). There’s no movie currently produced by a major Hollywood studio that does NOT have a DI and/or digital colour correction. Even Quentin Tarantino, who loathes anything digital, does a DI now.
Now back to shooting digital. It has been creeping forward, but has not taken over yet. I hear rumours of die-hards that actually shoot 16mm and use a digital de-graining process to prop up the sub-standard footage, rather than shooting digital. Please get real.

There have been lots of arguments flying back and forth, and in the past there were still a bunch of valid arguments for shooting film. Not anymore. After testing the ARRI ALEXA and RED Mysterium-X, I believe there are no valid arguments left. And I will explain why.

The only valid argument is for film as archival medium. The process (that only high-budget productions can afford), in which the red, blue and green ‘channel’ are recorded onto black and white film stock makes sense still, since there is no valid and safe alternative for long term storage of digital material yet. But as a recording and playback format, digital is more stable (only a 4-pin 35mm could come close), has less noise than film has grain, and it is cheaper (both in terms of stock, ‘developing’, dailies creation and printing). It takes less space. If you have an entire digital workflow (like we had on 2012), you can have 100% colour accuracy from the on-set monitor to the DCP (which you could never have with any analogue format). If you want high-speed, use the Vision Research Phantom camera, and you’ll have immediate playback (or an entire day later with a 35mm high-speed camera). You can get the same depth of field as 65mm film on certain cameras, if you like. Your sound can be synched on set, editorial can start editing after a few hours of shooting. With a good quality control pipeline, you can get an OK for your footage a few hours after you have shot it. You can see your image on set on a high resolution, colour corrected monitor. You can do visual effects overlays or live keys in full resolution on set. On top of all that, you can save anywhere from $50,000 on a low budget movie, to half a million on a high budget picture, in the process.

The only reason left for shooting film was that digital cameras did not have the same dynamic range 35mm film could provide.

Not anymore!

To be honest, I never thought the dynamic range discussion was a valid reason. Just look at the final result. It’s hardly a reason to baulk at two stops less than film, if a theatrical print made in a high-speed printing process has at best seven stops dynamic range, and your TV (that goes for DVD and Blu-Ray as well, of course) only displays 8-bit colour. But anyway, if that’s your only reason, it’s gone. The dynamic range of these two cameras blew me away. ARRI has measured 13.5 stops. What we found seemed to support that. Which brings me finally to our test.

Our Director of Photography, Anna Foerster, had never shot a complete movie digitally, but she was very intrigued by the subject. For someone coming straight from the ‘celluloid world’, there are two questions that are most important. The dynamic range and the colour reproduction.

fig 1 in FLICKR Set below: Take a look at these images: The daylight comes from a 4K and 6K HMI, bounced through the window. There’s a 400W HMI source as interior fill, and a 12×12 muslin on the right, as a bounce for the window light

The RED had slightly less dynamic range than the Alexa. I would put the RED rather in the range of 11-12 stops usable range, which is still excellent. I’ve heard of other test shoots for the RED coming in at 13 stops, and that may be true, too. But in direct comparison, we could see detail in the blacks of the ARRI footage that was gone in the RED, and the same with highlights. But, as I mentioned before, I believe none of this practically matters much, unless your DP grossly over or under exposes, which would be pretty much impossible if you have a calibrated monitor on set.

For colour negative film, the ISO/ASA rating is defined as a particular point on three D-Log H curves (for red, green and blue). This point, in short, determines the film stock’s sensitivity to light.

Digital sensors are a bit more flexible than film stock. Their sensitivity to light can be changed by setting the signal gain (Read: The input power). So digital still cameras use exposure indexes (that are created by addition or deduction of gain) that are similar to film’s ISO ratings and thus are marked as ‘ISO’ on the camera. Some HD cameras, like the Sony F-900, for instance, have a certain sensor rating (ISO300 for the F-900) and let you adjust the gain in dB increments, effectively changing the ISO. However, you have to be careful, as many digital cameras’ exposure latitude decreases when set to a higher or lower sensitivity than their native sensitivity. On top of that, digital cameras let you adjust the shutter past 180 degrees (270 and 360 degrees, which equals no shutter), which again doubles and quadruples the ISO, respectively.

RED quotes the Mysterium-X sensor as ISO 320-2000. Anna, the DP, measured during our test with a light meter. Jonathan Smiles, our Digital Production Supervisor, who has worked on several movies shot with RED, including District 9, set the F-Stop and metadata settings according to Anna’s light meter settings (we used 800 and 1280 ASA as a basis, and then also under-exposed by several stops for testing purposes).

Since the ARRI ALEXA is a prototype, not all of the features that will be in the release version, announced for June this year, were available to us. The release version will have an (as yet unspecified) on board recording solution. I think that’s not only a good idea, but a MUST, since the ARRI D-21 does not have any dockable recording options, like, for instance, the Genesis or Sony’s F-23 and F-35. ARRI RAW recording was not available to us yet, so we used the dual-link HD-SDI (4:4:4) signal coming from the camera. We chose to record on CODEX digital portable recorders. The CODEX portables record internally to JPG2000 format file sequences (which is also the standard for DCDMs (Digital Cinema Distribution Master), the current standard for digital cinema projection). The JPG2000 files sport a 1:4 compression, basically the same as Sony’s internal hardware compression when you record to HDCamSR tape at its normal 440Mbit/s rate.

We recorded the Red One footage to CF cards, at 42MB/s. We converted all the footage for post production via the REDCine-X (beta) software. The size per frame (at 24fps) is roughly the same, 1.75MB for RED (.r3d files) and 2MB for Codex-recorded JPG-2000 files. But the RED compression ratio is higher than the ARRI because of the bigger frame size. So as was expected, the RED shows more compression artifacts than the ARRI, especially in the higher-grain blue channel, but nothing out of the ordinary. We didn’t see any ‘clumped together’ chunks of pixels, as might happen when pictures get over-compressed.

The low noise level on both cameras absolutely blew me away. Just for kicks, we exposed up to four stops under from a base of ISO800, so the equivalent of 12,800 ASA. Even after seeing all footage on the big screen (we projected digitally, and filmed out to 35mm), I still think that ISO 3200, with some digital noise reduction in post, is absolutely feasible on BOTH cameras.

fig 2 is a blow-up of an image section of the ARRI ALEXA, pushed two stops in grading, the equivalent of ISO 3200! The noise level is absolutely acceptable.
In the RED M-X footage, the blue channel has the worst grain, then red, then green (which is to be expected, because of Bayer array interpolation). The ALEXA showed, surprisingly, less of a difference between the three channels, but still with the green channel being least noisy. One reason for that might be the sensor’s pixel size. Generally, the larger the sensor’s pixel size, the lower the noise. Digital SLRs, for instance, have generally lower noise (and pixel sizes of about 6.8 microns and up) than compact digital cameras (with a sensor size of around 3.5 microns or lower). ALEXA’s ALEV-III sensor has a pixel size of 8.25 microns, which I’m guessing is bigger than the Mysterium-X’s (for which I couldn’t find any data), since RED has to cram more pixels into the same space.

Fig 3 in FLICKR Set below – An extreme example: A blow-up of RED M-X footage exposed at ISO 12,800! I think the low noise level is absolutely amazing. Even this would still be usable, with a digital noise reduction applied, at least for documentary-style projects.

Other observations we made were that the ARRI ALEXA footage was generally softer (part of that is obviously because of the different resolutions between the two cameras, which makes them tougher to compare). ARRI’s sensor has a resolution of 2280×1620 pixels, downrez’d internally to 1920×1080. We actually liked the slightly softer look; it did seem film-like, since the edge sharpening is usually a give-away for broadcast video cameras. But RED M-X’s recording of 4480×1920 pixels (a cinemascope-like aspect of 2.33:1) does have the advantage of displaying slightly more fine detail. After looking at lots of different areas in the picture, we noticed, though, that resolution and detail-behaviour is very hard to pinpoint. For instance, if you sharpen an image only slightly, it gives the ILLUSION of more detail, so it’s easy to have a difference of opinion with many people in the screening room.

In terms of colour reproduction, the ARRI was slightly ahead of the RED. In the low light areas, we found slight colour shifts into magenta or green with the RED, while the ALEXA showed a stable reproduction of the brown wall. A similar effect happened in the gradient areas where the light streaming in from the window falls off into darkness. In some situations, the RED showed a rainbow-like array of colours, while the ARRI showed a straight gradient from white to brown. But both of these effects only become visible when playing around with the colours and lifting the gain in DI. The RED – and this could be due to the higher compression – shows a tendency to ‘flip’ colours faster than the ARRI. For example, if you correct the hues and try to take out just a slight amount of green, the RED footage would flip faster towards magenta than the ALEXA footage.

We noticed an interesting effect when light sources (in our case candles) come close to the lens. We tested the same lens on both cameras, to make sure that it’s not caused by the lens, but only the RED showed a soft red blooming effect that we were guessing might stem from the Optical Low Pass filter (OLPF). We sent the footage to the guys from RED, and they’re currently investigating.

fig 4 in FLICKR Set below – Another advantage of very low noise: Clean keys. This greenscreen, shot with the ARRI ALEXA at ISO 800, keeps all important details in the transparent and hair areas.

After three days of testing, I’m convinced that these two cameras (or, to be accurate, their sensors) are a huge step ahead for digital cinematography and open up new possibilities we’ve only dreamt of before. I’m sure other manufacturers will soon follow suit. And with higher resolution sensors and projectors already announced and in development, our cinematic future is bright, sharp and with very low noise…

Flickr Photo Set

Sentinel Entertainment’s new R&D lab website

I have launched Sentinel Entertainment’s new interactive R&D website. Sentinel is my production company since 2003, starting out in video production, 3D animation, website design and development, but now totally dedicated to the development of a few short films with a slate of features on the back shelf.

Check it out, new features will be added over the coming months. There will also be three tiers of membership

Free – access to public content is free with everyone who signs up.

Premium – for a minimum $10 USD or more contribution to one of my films you will have premium access to priviledged content including scripts, storyboards, casting information, location recce and photo galleries, live beghind the scenes updates and more.

Partner – for a $250 USD contribution you become a partner, a team member, listed under the Sentinel Entertainment R&D team with your own profile and bio page. This gets you full no-holds barred access to the entire development, pre-prod and production process of all the film projects on the go. You get to download, read and comment on scripts, vote on casting decisions, and have your say in every single aspect of the production. You are credited as an associate producer on all Sentinel films.

Get started for free, check it out! – http://www.sentinel-entertainment.co.za

The only live campaign on Indiegogo at this time is for the short film “The Investigator” – http://www.indiegogo.com/TheInvestigator

Film: not quite dead yet

Below is a fantastic article I just discovered here: http://www.encoremagazine.com.au/film-not-quite-dead-yet-1601

In a digital world, analogue is considered to be on the path of extinction, but film capture is not ready to go quietly into the night. Miguel Gonzalez found that DOP and big companies still have something for film.

There are no statistics about the film/digital split in Australia, but with fewer Hollywood projects shooting here, film companies have suffered.
Fuji felt the lack of big budget international productions; in 2009 they only had one major Hollywood project, the thriller Don’t Be Afraid in the Dark, which was shot on film in Melbourne using, atypically, both Kodak and Fuji stock.

The digital adoption trend is real, according to Fuji’s general manager for recording media and motion picture film Marc Van Agten, but mainly in the smaller budget feature segment.

“If you rate your movies by budget or success, most big ones were shot on 35mm film last year,” he said. “The ones that picked up awards and had reasonable budgets of more than $6m were shot on film: Mao’s Last Dancer, The Boys are Back, Bright Star, Charlie & Boots, Beautiful Kate, Disgrace… even films with a smaller budget like Samson & Delilah were also shot on film.”

Kodak’s manager for sales and marketing in Australia and New Zealand David Hill agrees: “It’s difficult to obtain accurate data in regards to the film/digital split due to the large number of films being shot in Australia, everything from shoestring budget features to international studio productions, but the majority of motion pictures that make it to cinemas and receive award nominations are still produced on film. The same is true for TVCs for international brands.”

FILM MADE CHEAPER

According to Van Agten, the initial cost difference between digital and film can be a deciding factor for a production when looking purely at the cost of shooting per minute or per foot. But digital projects tend to shoot a higher amount of extra footage, which makes post-production costs go up.
“That doesn’t happen with film because you’re trained to shoot on a 400ft can of film so you shoot on those increments.”

The cost factor has also been alleviated by the increasing popularity of 2-Perf cameras, which make a film load last twice as long. Film is normally pulled down into the gate four perforations at a time, to
produce a frame that is normally cropped down to 1:85:1, wasting a considerable amount of film.

This ‘2 Perforation Pulldown’ or techniscope technology, first developed in 1966, pulls down only two perforations at a time, using half the amount of film for a 2:4:1 frame, which is significantly smaller than the 4-perf frame in terms of surface. The popularity of 2-Perf was limited because it required an optical lab process as opposed to a contact print, but with the advent and lower costs of Digital Intermediates, 2-Perf has become more viable.

Panavision offers the Panaflex GII and Platinum cameras in 2-Perf, and ARRI too has made its Arricam and Arriflex available as 2-Perf.
The recent Australian hit Bran Nue Dae had a budget that initially did not allow for film, but DOP Andrew Lesnie was able to shoot on film using 2-Perf.

“Lesnie has received critical acclaim for the look of the movie and the way the landscape was captured, so 2-Perf is a real alternative to going digital,” said Fuji’s Van Agten.

While 35mm has been re-vitalised by 2-Perf, not all film formats are still going strong. Stefan Sedlmeier, general manager at ARRI Australia, foresees the decline of 16 mm as an acquisition format, as low and mid-budget productions – the type that would traditionally shoot on 16 mm – are precisely the ones transitioning to digital.

“It is not necessarily a format that can be sustained much longer for acquisition in Australia and New Zealand,” he affirmed. “It’s still preferred to shoot at remote locations because of its reliability and robustness, so it won’t disappear completely.

“While film will still be there for different reasons – for purists, for quality-oriented customers, for exhibition, for international exchange for developing countries, or for long term archiving – it will be 35mm and alternatives such as 3-Perf or 2-Perf, but 16mm is definitely declining.”
Digital is prevailing over the 16mm format in Australia, a country that is usually defined as an early adopter of technology. Sedlmeier believes one of the reasons is that high definition has become a standard for Australian productions, and 16mm is not good enough for HD. “The Australian industry loves new products; they are early adopters of new technology, and they have fast-changing minds. These are very passionate cinematographers,” he said.

THE QUALITY DEBATE

Discussions about film’s aesthetic and technical advantages are as fierce as a religious or political debate. There are facts but the main assessment remains one of perception. According to Sedlmeier, current digital cameras can’t replace 35mm in versatility and quality.

“It’s not just the pixel count; it’s the fidelity and natural qualities of the image. Film is still a very powerful medium; it can store the equivalent of about 1GB per second of data and it doesn’t really matter
how long it is, film can cope any kind of data amount. This is not necessarily true with digital storage yet, especially long term storage,” he argued.

Kodak has a campaign entitled Film. No Compromise to educate the industry on the benefits of shooting on film, but according to Hill, the company is “technologically agnostic”.

“With film, there is no compromise on image quality, production values and efficiencies, post-production workflow, and the ability to repurpose content for the future,” he explained. “But there are so many new opportunities to make, manage and move images and information; we serve the marketplace with solutions across different workflows, film and digital, and helping those technologies work seamlessly together.”

Academy Award-winning South Australian cinematographer Dean Semler (Dances with Wolves, Mad Max 2 and 3, 2012) has done seven projects on Panavision’s Genesis camera and believes the quality of the images is “as close to film as you could get”, with the advantage of instant high quality rushes, long running times and the ability to shoot in extremely low light levels.
Still, he “thoroughly enjoyed” the opportunity to work with the western Appaloosa in 2008, and finds the latest fine grain stocks from Kodak and Fuji “remarkable”.

“They still hold an edge on the digital images,” he admitted.
David Gribble (The World’s Fastest Indian, Fires Within) has a metaphor for it: digital is “like a painting without brushstrokes”.

“A digital image doesn’t have the grain structure to it. Maybe it’s because we’re used to seeing grain, so it’s as if you suddenly saw a painting without brushstrokes, you might think ‘this is terrible!’ “The grain look can be achieved in post, but it costs time and money, so it’s not necessarily cheaper. Besides, a cinematographer has to be aware that promises made in the field aren’t necessarily kept in the post for a number of reasons.”

Not everybody agrees on the superiority of film.

Ben Allan (All Saints, The Will) was an early adopter of digital high definition and his work made him the youngest person ever to receive the ‘ACS’ letters from the Australian Cinematographers’ Society. He also created The Grading Sweet, a package of colour grading plug-ins for Apple’s Final Cut.

“It’s past the point where there’s definite technical reasons to say film is the way to go for the ultimate quality and it’s easy to demonstrate that,” he said.

According to Allan, the choice is now purely a subjective creative one because the technical superiority has been overcome.
“These high-end cameras offer as much latitude, depth of field control and colour control as 35mm film.”

NEW POSSIBILITIES

Not all is said and done in terms of film. While it is true that major breakthroughs are unlikely to take place in the world of film cameras and stock, demand is still there and both Fuji and Kodak continue to release new products. They’re still spending money on research and development, to produce improved ‘neg’ and post stock.

“All parties continue to invest in the film business, and someone like Kodak or Fuji wouldn’t be pouring money into it if they didn’t see a future for it,” said Van Agten.

Fuji is looking at developing higher speed stock that can be shot in lower light, as well as achieving richer blacks and expanding the range for low-contrast films.

Its new Vivid 500 was used in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and it is designed to produce colour intensive images in challenging conditions such as night scenes.

A new 250 daylight stock will be launched in mid-2010, with samples currently being sent to cinematographers.

In terms of post stock, Fuji’s R&D helped the company – and its engineers Ryoji Nishimura, Massaki Miki and Youichi Hosoya in particular – receive this year’s Academy Award in the Scientific and Engineering category, for the development of the first motion picture film designed specifically for use in converting digital image data to negative film (Fujicolor Eterna- RDI). Because no intermediate film had been designed specifically for conversion from digital master to film reproduction, there had been a large disparity in image quality between both, and this new stock helps correct that problem.

And in April last year, Kodak expanded its Vision3 line with a 250D product. The entire Vision3 platform was developed with a film/digital hybrid approach in mind, and the company’s motion picture film portfolio will continue to grow with new additions.

“If you go back 10 or 15 years we had three film stocks, daylight, low light, and very high speed. Now we’re up to eight different types of stock, and about to release and develop new ones,” said Fuji’s Van Agten.
“It’s a very positive thing. I would be disheartened if we had not come up with new film stock.”

Both film companies’ consumer division has also undergone a significant change as only professionals still use film and everyone else is using digital cameras.

Free of the cost of film, they are shooting more photos than ever before, and still printing many of those. The result is that Fuji and Kodak are selling more paper and chemical products for consumer photo labs, and they are now offering online storage facilities where customers can keep their photos safe and order prints.

Fuji is even launching 3D cameras to capitalise on that growing trend, and will soon offer 3D prints.

The consumer division is also serving the lowbudget spectrum of the film industry as many feature films are using very low cost digital cameras that shoot high definition video.

“It’s not where we want to be long term,” admitted Van Agten. “It won’t replace our business, but we’ve got the technology to capture video on cards and stills cameras. Who knows where that’s going to take us?”
Overall, both companies have seen a growth in the stills photography division that is not apparent to the general public who may think the film giants are endangered species.

Both companies have a clear message to the world: they are no going anywhere.

“We’re not going to fight digital, we embrace it. DOPs have never had this much choice on what format to shoot on, but Fuji’s roots lay in motion picture film, and our CEO has always been said we’ll be the last man standing,” said Van Agten.

“At present, we believe the best professional motion picture workflow still starts with film. That said, we continue to assess opportunities in digital solutions across the entire chain to complement our film business,” added Hill.

According to Sedlmeier, ARRI’s R&D priorities are 85 percent digital, 15 percent film. In terms of film cameras, they’re still selling the Arricam LT and ST; they won’t be launching a completely new camera but revised versions with improved features.

“Our main focus is the development of digital devices such as the film scanner Arriscan and the new ARRI Lexar, which will be launched at NAB 2010.”

Other ARRI offerings include the digital ‘A’ series, but ultimately Sedlmeier believes that in the camera market companies are not just direct competitors, but also business partners, because they use the same recording techniques and their customers use each other’s components in their own solutions, e.g., ARRI lenses on Sony cameras.

Sedlmeier firmly believes that reliability is more important for ARRI than having the latest technologies.

“It’s not always necessary to have the latest software version, but it is necessary to provide reliable equipment because if the camera goes down, you have the actors, the set, everything becomes a disaster.”
So with so much R&D happening, what should film companies be working on, according to their end users, the cinematographers?
David Gribble believes storage and preservation is an area they should concentrate on, because it’s unclear at this stage how digital stock will store. Ben Allan adds that while the possibilities are the same as  what already exists, there is room for progress on grain structure, resolution, latitude, and colour response.

A PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE

Ever since the introduction of digital capture, the debate has been whether to choose one format or the other, but a number of DOPs have rebelled against these limitations and chosen to work with both.

Last year’s Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire (DOP Anthony Dod Mantle) was shot both in digital and film, not only for budget purposes but also depending on the needs of particular scenes. Handheld digital cameras were used for fast-paced scenes, running through the alleyways, but the spectacular panoramic shots were done on film.

“Some well-known DOPs who were very dedicated film people and are now very dedicated genesis cameramen and it suits their style. The secret is complementing both and being comfortable with all the different formats. The most successful DOPs know what each format is capable of and where it might suit the look of the movie,” said Van Agten.

Kodak’s Hill adds: “You will often hear film and digital described as competitors. We see them as creative allies; the business will always be about telling stories in which the technology is transparent.”
In our digital era, film is one of the exceptions were ‘old-fashioned’ technologies are not necessarily associated with older generations. Young DOPs may have grown up surrounded by computers and started their careers with a number of digital tools at their disposal, but that doesn’t mean that they will automatically prefer digital, or that they see film as something from the old days; they are more technologically savvy but appreciate the qualities of both old and new.

“Students, as well as emerging filmmakers, continue to aspire to shoot on film. With a film-based education, students enter the industry with a solid discipline in the art of filmmaking,” said Hill. “While technology, innovation and marketplace dynamics continue to evolve at an ever-increasing rate of speed, some things will never change.”

Regardless of personal opinions and perceptions, the market does change, and the signs are clear to everyone. A privileged few, those with experience and credits, might be able to exercise their power and tell producers that they only want to work with film – or digital – the way they’ve been able to decide the brand of stock they prefer.

That elite club might get their way, but others will be forced, if not to change their preferences, to at least be flexible. That is why Gribble believes that embracing change is a healthy attitude and cinematographers need to keep their options open.

“I remember a respected cameraman I was trained under and when someone told him ‘Take the camera in your hand’ he said ‘What? How dare you?!’ He was telling us about it in the pub, how ridiculous this handheld camera was. And this guy in a couple of years was sitting in the pub with no work,” said Gribble.

“When you see change, even if you don’t like it, embrace it and see how you can use it to your advantage, because some changes totally take over.”
Even if digital penetration continues, film will still be there the same way colour hasn’t kept people from working in black and white; there will always be a niche market for it.

“When it gets 20 stops down the line and you have more pixels than the grain in the film and therefore more control, it will be like when factories took over shoe-making,” argued Gribble.

“But there are still hand-made shoes today, just like there will always be hand-made films. Maybe I’ll get a call in my old age asking ‘Did you really work with film?’”

HPA 2010 – Low-Cost Plasma as a Reference Monitor – from ProVideoCoalition

Another awesome post from the HPA Tech Retreat on ProVideo Coalition. This has been a hot topic at our facility, we have these exact Panasonic plasmas in our FCP/Color grading suite, Flames, Flints and Quantel Pablo Neo suite (with a HD CRT). Calibration has been one of our biggest concerns. Check it out:

Pete Putman, Science Experiment: Low-Cost Plasma as a Reference Monitor. Yes, it’s time to toss the CRT.

A pro reference monitor must be able to track consistent color, neutral gray, wide dynamic range without clipping or crushing, consistent viewing over wide angles, precisely calibrate-able. Grayscale is the hardest thing, especially in digital (Pulse-width modulation (PWM) as used on plasma & DLP is the hardest). Shadows are always difficult; grayscale may wander around the ideal. Consumer sets often white-clipped, S-curves, tend to be too hot / too bright / high midtones, inconsistent black levels. Rolling back to 100 nits helps a lot. CCFL backlights bad for color, LEDs much better. Plasma pretty good, too. Plasmas use PWM for tonal control, >600Hz.

Q: is a $2000 industrial plasma good enough for critical monitoring? (LCD problems: costly, high black levels, off-axis color/tone shifts, bad color gamut on CCFL backlights). Took stock Panasonic TH-42PF11UK and tweaked with calibration tools. Got stable gamma with a couple of “speed bumps”, consistent if not perfect RGB tracking, great blacks. Color gamut exceeded 709, even large portion of P3. Green was a bit shifted towards cyan (for brightness). Gamma at 120 nits was 2.5; looked very smooth (movie mode), a bit of a bump in 2.2 gamma. Max gray drift was 145K in the shadows; bit of a blue bump around 70%. Brightness 100-120 nits (29-35 ft-Lamberts), contrast 1189:1 (checkerboard), 11370:1 sequential (gamma 2.2), black level 0.124 nits.

Wanted better; got a Cine-tal Davio using a 3D LUT to correct residual color and gamma errors (as seen in the demo room). After calibration, color accuracy was comparable to reference-grade CRT. Best of all: a very cost-effective solution.

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/awilt/story/hpa_tech_retreat_2010_day_3/

HPA 2010 – Panasonic 3D – from ProVideoCoalition

An awesome post I discovered today on www.provideocoalition.com from the HPA Tech Retreat, more fantastic info on their site. The following blog is by Adam Wilt, founder of ProVideo Coalition.

Michael Bergeron, Panasonic – Reducing Operational Complexity of Stereoscopic-Production Camera Systems.

We’ve been looking at what people have been doing with 3D cameras for ages—maybe a year and a half! Right now, 3D equals stereo glasses for the most part. Passive glasses and micropolarized screens (e.g., line-alternate polarization screen overlay) gives half-res; active-glasses alternate-image systems give full res.

3D cam system must (1) link and sync two cameras; (2) manage parallax or two images; (3) correct optical and parallax errors for good 3D (e.g., fix all problems in the first two things). Getting that last part done is one of the big roadblocks. For (1), lenses must be linked and matched very carefully. (2) Parallax (convergence) management: should convergence track focus? Not necessarily; convergence must be consistent with perspective: close-ups should be closer than wide shots irrespective of focus:

What about IO (interocular, a.k.a. interaxial)? Too narrow, too little 3D effect; too wide, exaggerated and even painful 3D. IO and convergence angles are also constrained by / interrelated with object size, nearest & farthest objects, camera placement. Close shots need tighter IOs, farther shots allow / suggest wider IO. Fixed IOs just limit how close your closest object can be. Scientific research is good, but it’ll also help to just put cameras out there and see what happens.

Side-by-side rigs: limit minimum IO, tight CUs (close-ups) are a problem, minimum IO depends on imager/lens size, but simple and easy to make.

Beamsplitter rigs: no limit on minimum IO, good for CUs, but beamsplitter acts as a polarizer (and you lose a stop of light), and it’s mechanically more challenging to align and keep in alignment.

Optical/parallax errors: vertical misalignment; magnification differences; different L & R distortions (and different focus planes). Perfect images aren’t needed, just images that match each other. Ways to reduce these errors: optical/mechanical (pricey, not necessarily possible in all cases); postproduction (not useful for live TV; can be expensive); realtime electronic processing (typically expensive).

Current 3D rigs require a lot of engineering expertise, and skilled operators. Can we scale this down? With an integrated system with a fixed IO, this gets a lot easier; integrated lenses can be tracked at the factory; consumer cameras are already fixing optical problems in realtime. “Operation should move from ‘Guitar Hero Easy’ (focus, zoom, iris) to ‘Guitar Hero Medium’ (focus, zoom, iris, convergence).” It’s not really different from what’s been happening to get integrated camera/lens systems in 2D (in terms of managing complexity and solving optical problems electronically).

Small imager allows close IO (and deep focus). Lenses tracked during assembly keeps cost down. CA correction:

Why this (1/4”, prosumer-looking) camera first? (And by the way “it’s not a consumer camera!”) The biggest 3D bottleneck is a lack of skilled operators. Buy getting this camera out as cheaply as possible, we get more people trained up on 3D. Like Google does: just go out and collect user data. “A lot of people will shoot a lot of bad 3D (marketing told me not to say that!).” But we’ll all learn from what people do with this camera.

We don’t know everything about this camera yet: IO distance isn’t yet set, nor is sensitivity, max convergence, zoom range.

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/awilt/story/hpatr2010_4/

Phillip Bloom’s Latest Parody – Mr Hitler NOT happy about the new Rebel T2i/500D!!

A fantastic new video from Phillip Bloom. If you are sensitive to swearing, don’t watch.

Look for his previous videos in this series, so funny and so so true. It just makes me want to stick to film even more, but really, the medium is not as important as good story. I’ve got nothing against these Canon DSLR’s, I think they’re great.